Simple. You didn’t. You also didn’t let anyone give you the responsibility for any decisions. And you certainly didn’t take on a role in a project that was critical to the survival of a dying town, even if the mayor was a guy you’d lay down your life for.
Isaiah’s lungs got tight, right on cue. Good time for a sip of PowerAde to cover. Except the bottle in his hand that Marchande had brought back from Voodoo Grocery wasn’t PowerAde, it was some knock-off brand called Quencher and it was purple, a color that probably signified grape. Normally Isaiah would gag. He drank half of it in one shot. Didn’t help.
Clearly he needed to spend a lot of time in Aria’s company talking about innocuous things like Shrek movies and less time with Marchande. He had a bet to win.
Five
Most weeks, Aria worked at Ruby’s Diner every night except Sunday, but only because Ruby’s was closed. The money wasn’t fantastic, but jobs were hard to come by in Superstition Springs and it sure beat being broke. Farmer Moon’s daughter-in-law did medical transcription on line—nice enough work if you had a computer and an internet connection—and some folks commuted to Bastrop or La Grange to work at the Home Depot or answer phones at an office. Also fine if you had a car.
Aria had none of those things and limited resources, which she mostly didn’t mind. Serenity had a bit of money that she’d inherited, but she also had definite ideas about the evils of computers, and since her aunt had never learned to drive, it never occurred to her that Aria might like to learn too. Havana had sweet-talked one of Farmer Moon’s sons into teaching her and then earned a scholarship to UT, which was an amazing
accomplishment, but meant Havana wasn’t around anymore.
After her sister had left, so much of the responsibility around the house had fallen to Aria that she’d started struggling in school, never her favorite thing anyway. Her grades hadn’t recovered enough to contemplate a scholarship and besides, who wanted to sit in a classroom longer than you had to? She liked people well enough to work for Ruby and the company at the diner was definitely better than sitting home alone in a quirky hotel that had only had ghosts for guests for as long as Aria had lived there.
Once her aunt’s five pen pals had stormed into town, the former military men had taken rooms on the second floor and things had gotten a lot livelier at the old hotel. Not only did she sometimes run into Tristan in the lobby, she got to dream about the delicious, six-foot-four blond god who slept just one tiny flight of stairs below her bedroom. It had all seemed so harmless—until this stupid bet.
How was she supposed to get Tristan to ask her out when she didn’t really want to go out with him? Okay, she wouldn’t mind it if something crazy happened and he fell helplessly in love with her, singing odes to her beauty beneath her window and stuff. But the odds of that were basically zero. Hence the whole reason she’d made such a big deal out of her crush. It was never supposed to go anywhere.
Worse, as she changed out of her waitress uniform after her shift that evening, her thoughts strayed to a different SEAL automatically. One who had dark hair and had agreed to help her land a date with Tristan. Imagine a wholly-masculine guy like Isaiah watching Shrek enough times to know the plot. Shrek, her favorite movie. Aria had watched it over and over growing up because it dulled some of the pain of losing her parents at the age of seven. Donkey made her laugh and Fiona had almost as funny of a name as Aria did, plus they both had red hair.
And then there was the whole thing about how Fiona turned into an ogre at night. But instead of hating herself for being ugly, she found the perfect life for herself alongside Shrek, who thought she was beautiful no matter what she looked like.
That was a real fairy tale in Aria’s opinion.
What had drawn Isaiah to it? He wasn’t hideous like Shrek. He was actually a really good-looking guy, clean-cut with a wiry build that hinted at both inner and outer strength. The real kicker was his eyes, though. He had one blue and one brown. Over time, she’d trained herself not to stare at them but it had been hard at first because they were so uncommon and interesting.
Someone knocked on her bedroom door and Serenity stuck her head inside without waiting for Aria to answer. “Hurry up, now. You have a caller!”
Aria paused midturn, her recently-shed uniform forgotten in her fingertips. “A what? It’s not 1942, Aunt Serenity.”
Serenity stuck her tongue out, but kept rearranging her long gray hair as if she couldn’t decide what to do with her hands. “I was born in the sixties I’ll have you know. Get dressed. Isaiah’s here to see you and it’s rude to keep a man waiting. Unless you’d rather receive him in that outfit, in which case I’ll show him in.”
With a glance down at her granny panties and serviceable bra, Aria arched a brow. “You wouldn’t.”
“Eh. Probably not,” Serenity mused as if actually thinking about it. “Might give a fellow the wrong idea about the kinds of things I’m okay with going on under my roof.”
Please. She and Isaiah were just friends and no amount of skin-showing—on the part of either party—would change that, thank goodness. It wasn’t like she had much to inspire a man in that department anyway since her share of womanly curves had gone to Ember. She slipped a sundress over her unsexy underwear and hustled her aunt out of the way so she could go see about her gentleman caller.
When she walked into the living area, Isaiah was cooling his heels by staring up at the very large watercolor that Serenity had hanging over her threadbare couch.
“Aria’s mom painted that when we were kids. It’s a longhorn,” Serenity explained helpfully since the painting did warrant some clarification—it resembled a giant uterus more than a cow. “Isn’t it brilliant?”
Isaiah flashed Aria a smile that could more readily be described as brilliant and nodded. “It suits the place.”
Clever man. Not everyone could make such a statement sound both sincere and like a compliment without actually validating Serenity’s opinion about the horrific artwork. Because it was frighteningly bad, not that Aria would disrespect her late mother by saying so.
“You didn’t come by for an art appreciation lesson, did you?” Aria asked, strictly because she was dying to know what had caused Isaiah to darken her aunt’s door.
Caleb came up to the third floor all the time to see Havana since they were engaged and also working sixteen hours a day together on the town revitalization plans. But this was the first time a former SEAL had made the trek upstairs specifically to see Aria and she might be a little giddy over it, never mind that he was the wrong SEAL. In this case, he was so very right and she wasn’t about to apologize for it.
Of course, he was probably here to talk about Tristan. Why else would he have come by, to take her on a date? Silly. She didn’t even want that. No one had to know about the tiny little bit of disappointment that wormed through her stomach. She didn’t even know what to do with that.
Serenity’s talk of a caller had gotten her all twisted around. She didn’t want to date anyone unless it was directly related to the bet. Except now she was thinking about dating someone just because they liked each other. And maybe she wasn’t so against the idea after all. In theory, anyway. In reality, there was still a lot of room to get hurt.
“I came to whisk you away for a private chat,” Isaiah informed her and gallantly took her hand in his as if they were an item and he had done it lots of times.
Everything promptly drained out of her head except for the fact that she was holding hands with a man.